Bloody Sunday

A peaceable procession, shot at

Bloody Sunday is dated 9 January Old Style, 22 January New Style, 1905: the shootings took place on that single day, and no longer duration should be read into the entry. Columns set out from the eleven branches of Gapon's Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St Petersburg, in the working districts of Narva, Nevsky, Vyborg, the Petersburg side, Vasilyevsky Island and Kolpino, each headed by its branch chairman carrying the petition scroll; the plan was to converge on Palace Square by about two in the afternoon and send a delegation with the petition. Marchers carried icons, crosses, religious banners and portraits of the tsar and sang hymns, and Gapon urged followers to tear up leaflets supporting revolutionary aims. The procession was therefore not an insurrection: it was a loyal, religious appeal addressed to the tsar, and it was dispersed by firearms.

The clash was not a single encounter before the palace but a series of collisions at bridges and entry points from around ten in the morning. Gapon's column was fired on near the Narva Gate, where about forty were killed or wounded, Gapon himself unhurt; at the Trinity Bridge infantry volleys broke a column after it pressed forward, with at least forty killed and wounded carried off and Uhlans sent after those fleeing; on Vasilyevsky Island Cossacks attacked with sabres, whips and horses; at about two in the afternoon the Preobrazhensky Guards fired four volleys on Nevsky Prospekt into a crowd that included many who had not marched. Cossack and cavalry charges with sabres recur throughout the accounts.

Those killed, and the dispute over how many

The dead included Ivan Vasilyev, chairman of the Assembly, and an old man named Lavrentyev who was carrying the tsar's portrait. Casualty figures are disputed and internally inconsistent across sources, and no single official count can be treated as settled: the tsar's officials gave 96 dead and 333 injured, another official estimate 132 killed, the Russian-language infobox ranges from 130 to 200 dead with 299 to 800 wounded and 688 arrests, the English-language infobox gives 143 to 234 deaths, 439 to 800 injuries and 6,831 arrests, with two policemen killed, anti-government claims exceeded 4,000 dead, and moderate estimates averaged about 1,000 killed or wounded, while Trotsky gave no precise figure but claimed hundreds killed, many secretly buried. Six thousand eight hundred thirty-one arrests is the figure given in one infobox. The attribution of the figure matters as much as the range, and the entry does not adopt any one of them as the truth.

Workers' own demands, and their own words

Gapon's Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers was a police-sponsored organization, but the petition it produced combined economic and political demands: improved conditions, fairer wages, an eight-hour day, universal suffrage, civil liberties, amnesty for political prisoners and the separation of church and state, with the convocation of a Constituent Assembly elected by universal, secret and equal suffrage at its centre. It ended with the warning that the workers would rather die before the palace than accept arbitrary rule. Workers framed their action in loyal terms and largely saw the tsar as a God-appointed protector who would act once informed; revolutionary parties in the city disapproved of a procession they thought lacked political demands. How far the rank and file matched this framing is worth treating with care: their own words are recorded too, as when St Petersburg workers asked whether they had the right to defend their comrades, and one participant later recalled being born a second time, not as an all-forgiving child but as an embittered man prepared to struggle.

The parties were not the organizers of the day. The three organizations then active in the capital, the Menshevik and Bolshevik Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, were weak, had no role in planning the January events and were taken unawares by the strike, though once the petition appeared they resolved to use it for propaganda; the St Petersburg Bolshevik committee issued a leaflet arguing that petitioning the tsar was pointless and that only overthrowing the autocracy could win freedom.

From the Putilov works to a general strike

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 a permanent urban working class formed in Russia's industrialising cities, generally unskilled, low-paid, working in unsafe conditions for up to fifteen hours a day; strikes from 1870 onward won limited factory legislation, the 1886 factory-inspection law and the 1897 restriction of the workday to eleven and a half hours. The immediate trigger in January 1905 was the dismissal of four workers at the Putilov works in December 1904, all members of Gapon's Assembly. The Assembly investigated, found the dismissals unjust and demanded the men's reinstatement and the dismissal of a foreman known as a supporter of the rival Ushakov mutual-aid society. The strike began at the Putilov works on 3 January 1905 and spread rapidly: by the evening of 7 January 376 establishments with 99,000 workers were striking, by the evening of 8 January 456 establishments with 111,000 workers, and by 10 January all 625 enterprises of the city with 125,000 workers; counting establishments outside the factory inspectorate the total reached at least 150,000. This was a mass movement in formation, not a demonstration that could be waved away.

The decision to fire

Responsibility for the shooting lies with the government and military chain of command rather than with a single court favourite or any one individual's caprice. On 8 January a conference of ministers and police chiefs resolved to place troops at the city's outskirts, refuse the workers entry to the centre and act by force in case of disobedience, and troops were also placed on Palace Square. According to participants no one at the meeting expected bloodshed, apparently assuming the sight of armed soldiers would turn the workers back. That evening the interior and police heads took Gapon's letter and the workers' petition to Tsarskoye Selo and showed them to Nicholas II, who recorded the episode in his diary. Overall command of the units assigned to suppress disorder lay with the Petersburg military district command, under Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich.

Nicholas II was not at the Winter Palace and did not give the order to fire, having left for Tsarskoye Selo on Saturday 8 January despite urgings from members of the imperial family to stay in the capital. He was nonetheless widely held personally responsible for the inefficiency and callousness of the handling. Accounts circulating in Korean-language sources that attribute the suppression to Grigory Rasputin are not supported by the Russian and English documentation, which locates the decision in the 8 January conference and the military chain of command.

Consequences

Bloody Sunday had grave consequences for the tsarist authorities: outrage and mass strikes spread to Moscow, Warsaw, Riga, Vilna, Kovno, Reval, Tiflis, Baku and Batum, with about 414,000 people taking part in the January 1905 work stoppage. Nicholas II tried to appease the country with a Duma, but the autocracy answered with brute force later in 1905, and an estimated 15,000 peasants and workers were hanged or shot between October 1905 and April 1906, 20,000 injured and 45,000 exiled. The political effect reached further than any single measure: the tsar had been seen as the people's champion and intercessor, with grievances blamed on the boyars, but after Bloody Sunday he was no longer distinguished from the bureaucrats and was held personally responsible for the tragedy, and a widely quoted reaction was that the country no longer had a tsar. The Assembly was closed down on the day of the shootings and Gapon left Russia with the assistance of Maxim Gorky.

The start of the active phase, and the name

Bloody Sunday is considered the start of the active phase of the Revolution of 1905, and historians such as Lionel Kochan treat it as one of the key events leading to the Russian Revolution of 1917; Lenin later called 1905 a dress rehearsal for the revolution. Among the later works that took up the day are Viskovsky's 1925 silent film The Ninth of January and Shostakovich's 1957 Eleventh Symphony, subtitled The Year 1905, whose second movement is titled The Ninth of January. The painter V. A. Serov, watching from the windows of the Academy of Arts, described a restrained, majestic, unarmed crowd marching towards cavalry attacks and rifle sights.

Russian also uses Красное воскресенье, Red Sunday, alongside Кровавое воскресенье for the same events, and the sources give both as alternative names of one occurrence rather than as two different ones. The type of event matters here: the term denotes the shooting of a peaceable, unarmed procession, not a battle, an insurrection or a military mutiny. Those appear in the 1905 Revolution as separate later episodes, the Potemkin mutiny, the peasant risings and the October general strike among them. Distinguishing the event from the reforms it helped precipitate is equally necessary: the tsar's August Manifesto was rejected by most liberals, and the October Manifesto of 17 October, with its amnesty and deeper reforms, divided the opposition by satisfying moderate liberals, while the tsar then watered down or avoided its points; the Duma that first met in April 1906 was not a genuinely independent body because ministers answered directly to the tsar. The name also overlaps other events, including the 1972 Derry shooting in Northern Ireland, which is a distinct entry.